Zomato.com now opens for public API

Zomato.com is the first Indian local search company to release a full-fledged API for all its data to the developer community. Zomato’s API was earlier private and only accessible to a select few partners like Mapmyindia, Makemytrip and Mycityway.

Zomato is a three-year old online food & lifestyle guide and with more than 10 lakh monthly users across 10 cities in India – Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Chandigarh. Earlier this month, Zomato had raised its second round of investment of Rs 13.5 crore from Info Edge, one of the largest Internet companies in India.

With the API, developers can leverage Zomato.com’s restaurant database into any ‘local’ application such as a city guide app, an augmented reality app or a local deal app, where users can check user reviews and menus for a restaurant which has a deal on offer. Zomato’s products (web and mobile) run on the same API ensuring that the data being served to developers’ apps is always real time and updated. Developers can get information such as restaurant listings, location coordinates, reviews, discounts, photos, menus and everything else that Zomato offers to its customers free of cost.

The API lets developers search through Zomato’s coverage of 18,000 restaurants, across 10 major cities in India, based on various criteria, which is covered in detail in their documentation, along with example codes. Further, Zomato has also provided an API Sandbox, where developers can test their requests. Currently, the API only provides data access to the ‘Restaurant Guide’ section, but Zomato plans to allow access to their ‘Events’ data soon.

Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO, Zomato.com, said, “We have been receiving content sharing requests from developers for a while and are very excited about releasing the public API. MapmyIndia, MakeMyTrip, Mycityway and Mate-on-go have already been using our API for a while and making it public opens up a world of possibilities. We would love to see and encourage developers to create innovative web and mobile applications using our content.”